Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  “I’m looking for an older woman named Dagmar. She lives on the kibbutz.”

  “Not this kibbutz.” Eyal poured steaming water from an electric kettle. “There’s no one named Dagmar here. Never has been.”

  Adam took a second to absorb the news that Dagmar might not live here anymore. Why hadn’t he prepared for that? He had assumed she’d either be here or dead. She wrote his grandfather that she would be on the kibbutz “for the rest of her life.”

  The secretary carried the brimming mug back to his desk and settled into his chair behind the mounds of papers. He gazed up at Adam, clearly itching for him to leave.

  Adam said, “Maybe she doesn’t live here right now, but I know she did in 1947.”

  “Forty-seven?” Eyal shook his head. “Maybe in the DP section. Temporarily. But she couldn’t have been a kibbutznik.”

  “She was a kibbutznik. I’m sure of it.”

  Eyal spread his fingers out on his desk. “Listen, Adam. I was born here in forty-eight and have lived here my whole life. My mother is a founding member of the kibbutz, the only founder still alive. I’m the longest-running secretary we’ve ever had, and I know the name of every single person who’s ever been a member. I’ve been through their papers so many times I could draw their family trees. There was never any Dagmar on this kibbutz.”

  Adam shrugged. “You’re wrong. My grandfather was here in forty-seven, and he knew her.”

  “I’m not wrong.”

  “Was your mom here then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll ask her.”

  “Fine, ask her. But she’s not going to give you a different answer. And please, please, leave her alone until after tomorrow night. We’re having a meeting, and . . . actually, leave her alone the next day too. This meeting—” He briefly closed his eyes. “It’s just not a good time.”

  Adam didn’t want to wait two days, but what could he do? He promised not to bother this woman before Wednesday and turned to leave. As he was passing through the door, Eyal called him back.

  “I want you to know, Adam, for your sake and ours, that we don’t give second chances.”

  Adam leaned in the doorway. “What? I didn’t know it was a crime to ask about an old lady.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve had this job a long time, and I’ve met a lot of volunteers. All I’m saying is do your job, keep out of trouble, and everything will be fine.”

  Adam descended the stairs of the small office building, shaking his head. Why did some people think they knew everything? Outside, the kibbutz’s poky main square was deserted except for Claudette, who stood in its center, head down, slowly rotating as if scanning the beige bricks for a lost earring.

  Which way was the volunteers’ section? It wasn’t far, but he’d been such a wreck walking over here, nothing looked familiar. Across the square was the dining hall, a single-story concrete building with glass doors. On the left was presumably the general store, its corrugated steel awning shading an ice-cream freezer and fruit stands. A few yards over from the store stood a door. Just a door. Nothing on either side or above it but a hem of concrete, making it look as if the door led to an invisible world. To the right of the square was the main lawn. Too embarrassed to ask for directions, he’d see if Claudette were heading back soon.

  He sidled up to her. “What did you lose?”

  She turned with a start. “Nothing.”

  Glancing down at the plaza’s interlocking bricks, he had no idea what she could be doing. “You heading back to the volunteers’ section?”

  Claudette circled one more time, eyeing the bricks, before nodding.

  Together they walked across the square, Adam’s hands in his jean pockets, one clasping the brooch, Claudette’s arms folded, fingers clutching the flesh over her elbows. A row of unchained bicycles waited outside the dining hall, handlebars gleaming with sunlight. Adam waited for Claudette to start a conversation, but she didn’t, and he was grateful to avoid chitchat. They followed a path around the side of the dining hall and walked along its wall of windows, upon which their mirror images followed them, surrounded by the blurry green reflection of the main lawn. No wonder Eyal had given him a hard time. He was the image of a junkie: twiggy arms coming out of a black T-shirt and disappearing into the pockets of jeans so big they barely hung on.

  This must have been how he looked that last time Zayde walked him from Lodmoor to the train station. If he’d kept the promise he made on that walk, he wouldn’t have had to lie on the application. When he came down to the foyer that morning, where Zayde waited for him, the receptionist had asked if she should call them a cab, but Zayde said, No, no, they would walk to the train station. Adam’s backpack was heavy, but he wasn’t about to complain; this was the third time they were doing this trip.

  At first they had walked in silence through the Queens neighborhood, past the houses covered in pastel aluminum siding, the small yards closed in by chain-link fences; hardly the picket-fence suburbs seen in sitcoms, but it always surprised Adam that New York City had houses at all. Zayde’s eyes, shaded by the brim of his straw fedora, squinted at a house with a plastic kiddie pool on its mowed lawn and a red BMX chained to its porch.

  “Maybe I should have moved us out here, where you could have had a nice bicycle.”

  Adam shook his head. “No. No way. I love where I grew up. Zayde, this . . . this has nothing to do with you.”

  Zayde sucked in his lips, lowered his gaze to his brown oxfords. “Just when I was supposed to start university, they stopped letting in Jews. To this day I have no idea what I would’ve studied, what I would have become. A musicologist? Maybe a dance critic. Probably not a furniture salesman.”

  Adam tasted blood. He’d been chewing on his cheek. His grandfather almost never spoke about those times. Should he say something? What?

  “Finish college, Adam. I worked hard to save that money so you could go. I don’t want to make you feel bad, but it’s true.”

  Adam forced himself to look at his grandfather, to make a promise he wasn’t entirely sure he could keep. “I promise, Zayde, I’m done. Seriously. You’ll see. I’m going to be somebody you can be proud of.”

  His grandfather looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t want it for me, Adam.”

  Adam was shaken out of his thoughts when Claudette about-faced and started marching back. He turned. “Hey, where you going?”

  After three or four steps, she pivoted again and came back. They continued walking.

  “What just happened?” asked Adam.

  Eyes fixed on the path in front of her feet, she said, “Sorry. I . . . had to do that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I did.”

  Adam noticed now that Claudette’s eyes never left the ground. And once in a while she did that thing with her hands, clapping like the Musical Jolly Chimp. He was getting a better idea of what kind of institution she might have been in.

  “Claudette, can I ask you a question? Did you really live in an orphanage until a few months ago?”

  She nodded.

  “But orphanages are homes for children. Are you sure you don’t mean some other kind of, you know, institution? It’s safe to tell me. I’m a four-time, not-so-proud resident of Lodmoor Rehab.”

  She made no response, only pulled her crossed arms into her chest, and Adam let it go.

  They passed another one of those strange doors, which he now saw had a slope of concrete behind it, and made a turn before the jasmine bushes. He trailed Claudette down the steppingstones, which she took like a bride going down the aisle, bringing her feet together on each stone. When they reached the bottom, a sandy-haired chihuahua rose from the grass around the flowering tree and trotted alongside them, surprising Adam. He associated chihuahuas with uptown wives who lunched after Bergdorf’s, not the Middle East. As they neared the room where Adam had seen the naked girl, Claudette pulled a key out of her pocket.

  He said, “I thou
ght nobody used keys around here.”

  “My roommate wants the door locked at all times. Every night she goes out and locks me in the room.”

  The partying roommate, putting on all that eyeliner. Where could she be going on a kibbutz? What nightlife could they possibly have? Did kibbutzim have bars? Forget it. He shouldn’t even wonder. He took a gander at the picnic table: the bottle was gone.

  To ask anything other than whether the kibbutz had a bar, he pointed to Claudette’s pendant. “So who is that anyway? Guessing it’s a saint.”

  She pressed the medallion against her chest, seeming at once proud and shy to talk about it. “Yes, it’s Sainte Christine de Liège. In English, she is called Christina the Astonishing.”

  The chihuahua reared onto its hind legs and pawed at Adam’s calf, forcing him to scratch its tiny head. The dog closed its eyes to bask in the affection.

  “Yeah? What was so astonishing about her?”

  “So much.”

  “Such as?”

  “At Christine’s funeral—she was only twenty-two when she died—she floated out of her coffin, and God spoke to her. He gave her a choice: she could either go to Heaven or she could come back to life and save people in Purgatory by suffering on their behalf. Every time she suffered, a soul would be released. She chose to come back, and for the next fifty years, she tortured herself. Jumped into fires. Swam in frozen rivers. She starved herself, never ate any food, except the milk from her breasts. She had milk even though she was a virgin.”

  Adam struggled not to smile. “That is pretty astonishing.” After a second’s thought, he added, “I guess it would be nice to believe someone was out there, atoning on my behalf. Poof! I’m sin free.”

  Claudette wrapped her hand around the saint. “All you have to do to believe is believe.”

  “Right.”

  Adam continued to his room. He didn’t want to lie down, but he had no choice. His eyes were closing against his will. And he needed to keep close to the toilet. The cramps were only warming up, and he didn’t want to risk a repeat of what happened last time he was detoxing: while standing on line at Duane Reade, trying to ignore the cramps, before he understood what was happening, he felt a warm liquid flowing down his leg. He lowered his eyes, thinking, God no, but there it was, diarrhea oozing out of his jean leg and pooling around his Converse.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said to the chihuahua trotting next to his ankles. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  The chihuahua whipped its tail. Adam stopped, looked around for its owner. Claudette still stood at her door, wiping its knob with her shirttail.

  “Yo, Claudette. Do you know who this little guy belongs to?”

  Claudette clutched the shirttail in front of her. “It lives in the volunteers’ section. People leave food and water for it by the tree.”

  “It got a name?”

  “Golda, I think.”

  The tiny dog gaped up at him, its big black eyes wide, giant ears on end. A dog had always been something other people had, normal people.

  When he started walking and the dog followed again, he asked, “Are you going to insist on coming with me?”

  The chihuahua’s tail wagged faster, and Adam felt his eyes closing on him again.

  “All right. Let’s nap.”

  Adam sat cross-legged on the grass, wearing the kibbutz work clothes, scanning their phone directory for a Dagmar, while Golda slept in a warm coil beside him. He’d just returned from his first shift in the dishroom and felt better, at least physically. Yesterday, after saying goodbye to Claudette, he had spent the rest of the day running between the bed and the toilet, only leaving his room to pick up toiletries around dinnertime. After managing to swallow a couple of boiled potatoes in the dining hall, he returned to his room and lay facedown on the bed, intending to rise in a few minutes to shower, but it was four o’clock in the morning when he awoke, having no idea where he was or what he’d done, and then it all came back. With the windows full of darkness, he showered, shaved, and showed up for his shift an hour early. When eight hours of wiping ketchup and hummus off plates were over, his boss, Yossi, a stubby guy with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, thanked him for doing a great job. He also informed him that he’d never met anyone named Dagmar, but that he should check the archives when its manager, Barry, got back from reserve duty next week. After circling Barry’s name, he handed him the kibbutz directory.

  A stapled packet no thicker than a term paper, the kibbutz directory couldn’t have been more different from the five-inch-thick Manhattan phone book, but Adam was still brought back to those afternoons he spent in a phone booth on the corner of Essex and Delancey, scanning the names for his father. When he was twelve years old, his grandfather finally told him that, honestly, he couldn’t be sure who his dad was, that his mom had named him Soccorso because her boyfriend at the time was Tony Soccorso, and she had hoped that using his name would keep him in the picture; but Tony insisted the dad was Jerry Cohen, a boy who did come around a lot. Adam didn’t want to hurt Zayde, didn’t want him to feel like he wasn’t enough, so he used the pay phone to call the eight Tony and Anthony Soccorsos in the white pages and the ninety-four Gerry, Jerry, Gerald, and Jerald Cohens. Four separate afternoons he spent in that glass booth scratched with slurs and sprayed with tags, his pockets bulging with quarters. Had one of those voices he’d heard been his dad’s? None of them even admitted to knowing a Sharon Rosenberg.

  “Pervert.”

  Adam raised his head. The girl towered over him, wearing the same navy work shirt and beige work pants as him, and plenty of eyeliner, though not as much as that night. The late afternoon sunlight inflamed her absurdly red hair.

  He brought his hands together. “I’m so so so sorry about that. I swear it wasn’t what it looked like. You know, you really should shut your blinds when you’re getting dressed.”

  “And you really should not be having your eyes in people’s windows.” Her flinty Russian accent made it hard to tell if she was angry or simply giving an idiot some advice.

  “Listen, I was walking around the back of the building for totally other reasons and . . . well, there you were. But I swear on my life I wasn’t getting my rocks off. Honest to God. Did you report me?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “No.”

  Adam blew through his lips. “Okay. That’s good. Thank you.”

  “I do not report people.”

  She shot him a pitying look before leaving to join the other Russians playing cards around the picnic table.

  Adam went back to the directory. He was nearing the end without any luck. If only he had a last name. Many of the listings were simply the “Horesh Family” or “Kaplan Family.” He reached the last page. No Dagmar. A red petal fell on the list of names. The tree was shedding its flowers, dappling the lawn. Adam lay back on the grass and gazed into its branches. Golden sunbursts came through the leaves and flowers. One more day, and he could talk to Eyal’s mother. He had seen her name in the directory.

  He closed his eyes. The exotic smell of the freshly mowed lawn put him on edge, but the sound of the Russians bantering around the picnic table was homey. Adam had been lullabied to sleep on many a summer night by people chitchatting in a foreign tongue, ever since that first sweltering July night he moved in with his grandfather, almost twenty years ago. Several old people, seeking relief from their lonely, muggy apartments, had dragged kitchen chairs onto the sidewalk, and for hours they sat beneath his second-floor window, kibitzing in German and Yiddish. He lay listening to them for a long time after Zayde explained what had happened to his mom.

  When his mother first failed to pick him up that afternoon, nobody had been surprised. Certainly not Mrs. Wadhwa, the Indian woman who babysat several kids in their apartment building in Gowanus. It was normal for Adam to still be sitting in front of the TV long after the other children had been picked up, while Mrs. Wadhwa collected the toys off her floor, mumbling, �
�I should charge your mother more, I really should.” Things only started to seem different when he was still on the couch as Mr. Wadhwa came through the door in his bus driver’s uniform. After saying hello to Adam, Mr. Wadhwa pulled his wife into the kitchen, where Adam could hear them whispering between muffled phone calls.

  Hours passed. Night fell. A knock came at the door, and Adam went running at the sight of his tall grandfather standing with his straw fedora in his hands. “Zayde!” He threw his arms around his legs. His grandfather, cradling his head against his waist, said, “You’re coming home with me.” Didn’t it seem strange to the old man that he took his hand and followed him down four flights of stairs and across the foyer’s black-and-white checkered floor and out the building and down the street without ever asking, “Where’s my mom?”

  They took a cab to Manhattan, not the train—another sign this was not a regular day. Adam had never traversed the bridge in a car and was hypnotized by the ever-changing rhombuses made by the Brooklyn Bridge’s crisscrossing silvery cables. The city lay in wait for him, an enormous Lite-Brite, the two new towers soaring into the sky. When they got to the apartment on Essex, Zayde ordered pepperoni pizza, which they ate at the small wooden table pushed against the kitchen wall. Actually, only Adam ate; Zayde sawed off a bite with his knife and fork, but never brought it to his mouth. When Adam had eaten as many slices as he could, Zayde said, “Adam . . .” Adam fell quiet, braced for the bad news about his mother, whatever it was this time. But then Zayde stacked the unused napkins. “Let’s clean up first.”

  They did the dishes right away instead of leaving them on the table, as Adam was used to. Zayde washed, Adam dried: they were a team. While Adam brushed his teeth, Zayde sat on the toilet. “Always brush for a count of a hundred,” he said. “Your teeth will sparkle.” Adam hoped Zayde would never get to whatever it was he had to tell him. Why couldn’t they just do this? Just carry on? Adam was led to his mother’s old bedroom. His very own room. No sleeping on the couch. Zayde tucked him in so tight he couldn’t move. Then the old man sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand.